GitHub Gets Some Love from Microsoft

March 29, 2013

GitHub is a big deal, the best possible brand of social media for developers, enabling open source code sharing and collaboration. Mac and Linux operating systems have long embraced GitHub, but acceptance by Microsoft has been a bit more reticent. However, Wired shares some good news in their article, “Microsoft Windows Gets More Love From Git.”

The article has this to say about the changes toward GitHub by Microsoft:

“The site is the home to more than 4.5 million open source projects, letting software coders share and collaborate on software code, and sometimes, people share other stuff too. But Atlassian — the Australian company behind popular developer tools like JIRA — . . . is rolling out a tool that will compete with GitHub’s Windows client: SourceTree, a visual tool for working with GitHub, BitBucket, Stash or any other code repository based on the code-management tools Git or Mercurial. SourceTree has long been available for Macintosh OS X, but as of Tuesday, Windows developers can download the public beta.”

This is the most recent example of the softening of relations between the two. A few months ago, Microsoft integrated support for GitHub into their Microsoft Visual Studio. So what does this mean? Open source is here to stay and Microsoft is scrambling to get on board. It also means that Microsoft is likely to start losing ground quickly in the enterprise search arena to smart open source or open core solutions like LucidWorks. Microsoft has never really been a leader in innovation, but it seems like now they are just hoping to stay in the game.

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